Ten years ago Will Fraser spotted a market for recordings of keyboard instruments, using the global reach of the internet to find their niche market. “I wanted to produce films that you can’t find on television, knowing there was an audience which would react when word of them arrived on the web. And out of that, Fugue State Films was born.” He talks about the challenges of fundraising and filming Fugue State’s acclaimed organ series, especially the recently released box set on Max Reger, their biggest project so far.

How did Olivier Messiaen combine the creative life with the conventions and strictures of his role as organist? And how can that help us understand and perform his music? In this year’s RCO Organ Forum at the Royal Academy of Music, Artistic Director Robert Sholl brought together academic and performance experts to answer these questions, in a celebration of Messiaen’s work held in this, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the composers’ death.

Privileged access to historic places and instruments is a feature of RCO courses and classes, but it doesn’t get much better than sitting at the sky-blue and gold organ of the Royal Chapel at Versailles. Eleven organists visited Paris to play the Classical French repertoire on instruments of the period on an RCO study trip in June this year, under the tutelage of the organist at the Royal Chapel, Jean-Baptiste Robin.

Composers of the French organ school of the Classical period were meticulous in writing out types of registration. Alexei Panov discusses evidence for the exact composition of Grand Jeu and Plein Jeu registrations, in the light of writings of the time.

In this second video on playing styles, Daniel Moult discusses style and performance practice for the French Baroque school.

Annelies Focquart has investigated some new sources which cast a brighter light on the ten years Belgian organist Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens spent in Britain, as organist, concert performer and teacher, before his return to Belgium in the late 1870s.

Jehan Alain took a fluid view of his music, and very few of his organ works reached the stage of a definitive version in his lifetime.  This confusion has been compounded by discrepancies in published editions of Alain’s work throughout the twentieth century.  Stephen Farr discusses the available sources for selected organ works of Alain, […]

Charles Holt (d. 1978) was an organ enthusiast who made a point of listing several hundreds of performance timings of Vierne’s music – in particular his 24 Pieces en Style Libre.  Hugh Benham analyses Holt’s listings in this article from the RCO Journal of 2011, which reveal interesting differences between individual performers and Vierne’s own […]

Edward Higginbottom discusses aspects of performance that can bring to life the repertory of French organists composed between c1650 and c1750 – the ‘French Classical School’ – in the light of the aesthetic theory of the time.  In particular he discusses how the job of the organist of the time was to express the omitted […]